Month: October 2007

Now that Picard QT has entered Beta testing, the TRM server is officially on a 90+/- days notice!

The TRM acoustic fingerprints have been less than effective for quite some time and about 18 months ago we implemented MusicDNS’s PUID fingerprints in Picard. Now that we have a user friendly tagger that can replace the Classic Tagger we’re going to pull the plug on the TRM server in about 90 days. More specifically, we’re going to turn off the TRM server after the next schema change release, which is currently scheduled for early 2008. During this release we’re going to remove the TRM tables from the database and shortly thereafter we’re going to flip the switch on the TRM server — this may happen as early as February 1st, 2008.

What does that mean for you? If you use an application that uses TRMs, such as Amarok, Classic Tagger or iEatBrainz, please migrate to an application that uses PUIDs instead. Amarok can be compiled to use PUIDs and Classic Tagger and iEatBrainz will be replaced by Picard QT.

Picard QT is the port of Picard away from the troublesome wxWidgets toolkit and over to the much more stable QT toolkit. Along the way Lukas reworked the UI to be more intuitive and added the much anticipated TaggerScript language that gives the user total control over how to tag their music collection. The great news amidst all this is that with QT Picard now runs well on OS X — something that we could never achieve with the wxWidgets toolkit!

We have installers for Windows and Mac OS X and a tarball for our Linux users — grab them from the Picard download page. We’re hoping to have a final release of Picard QT in about a month. In the meantime, please report any bugs you may find.

Our director John Buckman of Magnatune has recently stepped down from the board of directors of the MetaBrainz Foundation due to an overwhelming number of other responsibilities. Derek Sivers, the founder and lead geek behind CD Baby joined the board of directors today to replace John.

Thanks to John for all of your efforts in supporting MusicBrainz/MetaBrainz and thanks to Derek for joining us. I’m looking forward to working with you!

If you have an existing installation of the MusicBrainz server, follow the instructions below to upgrade your installation to the latest and greatest. You can skip steps #0 and #7 if you’re not running a slave server.

The final set of changes that are now live are documented in our server release notes. Now its time to go an apply tags to your favorite MusicBrainz data!

Thanks to Dave, Lukáš, Murdos, Acid2 and Jugdish for contributing towards this server release! Its been a long time in the coming, but we managed to squeeze in a number of significant improvements in this release.

UPDATE: One of the changes to the database will cause a few Edit Relationship edits to fail. (e.g. #76493) — sorry for the inconvenience!

After finding a couple of serious issues upon doing a final code review, I’ve decided to post-pone the server release until Oct 14th. I’ve had to make invasive changes that require more testing, so I do not feel comfortable doing the update today.

Sorry if you’ve been looking forward to this release, but I want to ensure that things go smooth when we do make the switch. And it also seems that we have record traffic right now, so there are too many things telling me to wait with the upgrade.

Due to a number of loose ends that we still need to tighten up (and lack of sleep on part of the people doing the work) we’re going to rest, then fix issues and aim to complete the server update tomorrow.